Baby when you are four years old you will cocoon yourself in blankets with hopeful eyes glued to the screen with scenes of Cinderella, Snow White, Aurora- each with their prince charming. You will molt your cocoon, hoping to be a butterfly when you wake. Sand will be dusted in your still dreamy eyes and sheet lines will linger on your left cheek. You will embody your desired identity as you cooly slide on your petal pink dress with daintily poised fingertips. You flower, you will attempt to delicately glide around the quiet hollowness of the sleeping house- awaiting your prince charming with warm rose cheeks. Your mother will sleepily smile from afar.


When you are in the fourth grade you will watch the evil un-blinking glares of twenty-four snakes. All hissing with their slithering reckless tongues, all waiting to spew new venom with each coming day. Baby you are clay and will weakly take the form of whatever they choose to mold you into that day. When you are home, your mother will tell you to be more solid as she smoothes you out into a seemingly unscathed form- a blank canvas for them to imprint the following morning. You will look at yourself in the mirror and all you will see is the illusion of the disfigurement they declaredly molded you into- their fingerprints are deeply ingrained. Baby most nights you will lay awake as you try to think back on any moment of the past that made you deserve to be so repulsive. You will dream of being Cinderella- that maybe the world is simply filled with step-sisters. That in the end, prince charming will make all right.


At the age of eleven, you will give your first crush a valentines day card confessing that you were in love. He will hold up your flimsy hope-riddled red card through which twenty-four bulls will charge. They will all take out their magnifying glasses, playing Sherlock Holmes and comparing handwriting. Upturning every possible rock until they come to the one you are shaking under. The muffled cackles will dance tauntingly around your head. You watch the boy take a chunk out of the chocolate heart you gave to him as he walks out the door. Your mother will again smooth the distorted clay as she tells you that one day you will find someone who will make you feel so beautiful that you will be the sculptor of your own beautiful masterpiece. You will cling to that with trembling desperate hands.


But baby don’t worry because the summer before high school you will become beautiful. Your skin will darken and faint freckles will brush across your nose. Your face and body will thin and elongate. Your cheeks will blush and the color of your lips will deepen. Your hair will be salty and hued blonde. You will grow, you will develop.
The first time the boy from summer camp takes you behind the building and tries to kiss you, you will run away crying- thinking it is a joke. For you look in the mirror and still see the lump of de-formed clay with a bite-mark where the heart should be.


Then you will fall in love with the southern boy with smiling bright blue eyes to match his blue jeans. The boy with the subtle drawl and protecting arms. You will feel like an urban girl being exposed to the vastness of the country. But the vastness is merely a painting that you find yourself running into time after time. You will feel a sense of claustrophobic guilt- for your achievements, for your family, for your friends, for your newfound beauty that you are still learning to accept and hone.
And your chest will feel as if it is eating you from the inside out as you forcefully shut your eyes and pack up the beautiful painting with marks where you once collided. The painting so full of potential, deep within a box so encased in duct tape you wouldn’t even know that it’s a box. You place your hopes and dreams and your vision of your future together in the bed of his red Chevrolet. And with the heartbreakingly familiar sound of his engine, a part of you will die and darling, it won’t be revived. You will look in the mirror and desperately try to hold up the clay that is seeping through your fingertips faster with every second. Because darling flower, your loving tears are only making the clay run thin. You will try to maintain the figuration you were when you were with him. But his bitter-sweet fingerprints of the past, present, and your future together are pooling at your feet.. You are left with what you always were- an empty canvas.


You will be sick. Or maybe you will be cured from the sickening two years. It’s hard to distinguish the two. But baby you will go a little mad.


You will have so much love in your heart. You will feel everyone’s love, hope, and pain. And you will give love to whoever gives it to you, for the desire has been too deeply conditioned. You will interlock your fingers protectingly around their secrets and harbor their burden as if they were your own. And you will try so desperately to love them. But you won’t, because belong to nobody. You will be a fleeting dream. A beautiful reverie performing on untouched soil. You will take the form of a wild flower and oh how you will dance. You perfect little flower, let me water those delicate leaves that were once near death. Just dance with me. Tame you. Whirl around and exploit you. I need sun’s warmth. And oh how I will give you shelter from harms way.
- But baby you will end up harming them more than you could claim that you saved them. You will be left a wilting flower with the loneliness of desperately shoving your own happiness and worth into the filthy, greedy arms of lost souls.
And darling- you will be left with the loneliness of fulfilling every temporary desire.

Hands grasped at your ankles turn to shackles so you’ll run. You’ll run every single day.
You won’t really leave though.


But you were never truly a flower. And your clay has long been solidified. You have been molded, imprinted, dented, watered down, flattened, stretched, and you simply won’t have the movement anymore. And you will be alone. You will watch young girls pick daisies and put them in their blonde hued hair. You’ll see wandering un-blinking eyes. You’ll see dirt on innocent white cotton, and the shameful hands shaking from the rush of brown contrasted on white. You’ll look into naive eyes so tainted that you could even see the images of prince charming glistening in their hopeful gaze.

Baby you will dream. You will wake up in the middle of cold December nights sweating and panting, reaching out into the vacant space to your side- expecting to grasp a loving face, your four-year old self, your southern boy, your puddle of identity, or another chance.

What is the temporary blessing of beauty in the face of eternal loneliness?